Ensonifying space

It is very heartening and interesting to read so many fascinating articles, emerging from my Tuning into the Universe piece for Huffington Post this weekend.

Scientists and journalists from Huffington Post community have published a range of pieces on everything from data sonification, to astereoseismology, to the reminiscences of a former astronaut. Together these articles greatly expand the field of general knowledge around the physics of radio astronomy, and our capacity to sensorially experience it.

One of the pieces draws on an interview with radio astronomer, and the co-founder of the SETI Institute, Jill Tarter. Amplifying the central message of  Tuning into the Universe, Tarter notes that:

"when SETI listens to the cosmos, the institute is actually receiving electromagnetic radiation. And then, just the way your radio does, that energy can be used to make audible sound."

The pieces published in response to the article extend, expand and ensonify this notion.  Some of my favourites include:

The Sound of the Deep Sea of Space by radio astronomer, Dr. Tyler Nordgren equates the universe with a vast ocean, echoing Carl Sagan's famous analogy from his series, Cosmos. He poetically maps out the methods of astronomical observation available to modern astronomers, beyond the detection of visible light. He notes: "as a young radio astronomer I learned early on that every time human beings have explored the world with new senses we have discovered new and amazing phenomena".

Voices Carry by Anna Leahy and Douglas Dechow explores the sonic signature of our own planet:

"The sound of the Earth's inherent dynamics -- the movement of atmosphere and oceans -- produces a steady drone as well. Lightning produces crackling, which scientists call sferics."

Voyager Golden Record

The article includes a memorable passage about the Voyager Golden Record, which contains 'greetings in 56 languages, natural sounds like thunder and crickets chirping, and music from around the world', encoded in audio and now travelling towards the outer reaches of our solar system on board Voyager.

In An Audible Tour of the Solar System? Sign Me Up!, astronomer and planetary scientist, Jim Bell analyses our celestial neighbourhood, exploring the potential for acoustic sound on each of our nearest planets. The Perfect Quiet of Space by legendary astronaut, Jerry L. Ross, is the extraordinary account of his nine spacewalks, undertaken during his seven missions into space.

Jerry L. Ross n one of his nine spacewalks.

He writes eloquently about the silence which astronauts experience, when outside the International Space Station:

"Without the sophisticated listening devices scientists use on earth to hear the whispers of the universe, to an astronaut space is infinite quiet, a place where we bring the only sounds that break the silence."

Sound: The Music of the Universe by Mark Ballora and George Smoot III is an excellent overview of the practice of data sonification, which takes in in the brilliant work of the xSonify team, who are making sonification applications for blind scientists. The article also refers to the emerging science of astereoseismology and exoseismology, which I talked about last Friday in my Sonic Acts talk.

They clearly explain why data sonification methods can be useful:

"Symbolic renderings create other perspectives. Literal renderings are not always compatible with the capabilities of our auditory system. When data points are treated as audio samples and played back at audio rates (typically at 44100 values/second) quick changes are lost to us, as we can't hear fluctuations discretely at the millisecond level. If, instead, we treat the data points symbolically, for example as pitches, we are better able to "magnify" what we are listening to."

In Understanding the Sound of Space, Ayodele Faiyetole notes that sound is under used in science.  He draws on an interview with cosmologist, Yuko Takahashi, who believes there's a great value in presenting scientific results in a totally different dimensions, such as sound:

"Maps of CMB anisotropy can be converted to sound as a telescope sweeps across the sky to give the audience a better appreciation of the fluctuations."

As Ballora and Smoot put it, "if the universe is, at some level, music, then it seems only natural that we should study it with musical tools of thinking."

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tedweekends/

Tuning into the sound of the universe with radio

This weekend, Huffington Post have published my piece, Tuning the Universe, which contextualses my TED talk, which they are featuring as part of TED Weekends.

The piece provides some background into the audified radio waves which I played during my talk. Here's the gist of the article:

"We have been surrounded by stunning portrayals of our own solar system and beyond for generations, in books, on film and on television. But in popular culture, we have no sense of what space sounds like.  And indeed, most people associate space with silence.
There are, of course, perfectly valid scientific reasons for assuming so. Space is a vacuum. Sounds cannot propagate in a vacuum.  But through the intervention of radio, it is possible for us to listen to the Sun's fizzling solar flares, the roaring waves and spitting fire of Jupiter's stormy interactions with its moon Io, pulsars' metronomic beats, or the eerie melodic shimmer of a whistler in the magnetosphere."

My talk, and my work in this area, emerges from the science of radio astronomy.

RT16 at the Ventspils International Radio Astronomy Centre. Latvia

Whilst optical astronomers use telescopes to look at the visible light emitted by stars, radio astronomers use radio telescopes, or antennae, to detect radio waves. By combining radio astronomy with radio and sound engineering, we can hear as well as see the stars, and thus greatly expand our sensory perception of our cosmos.

It is important to remember that stars and planets are not directly audible. The recordings I played in my talk are radio waves which have been converted into sound waves using radio receives and amplifiers.  This is a process I refer to as audification. Huffington Post have also published two companion pieces which respond to the talk, the first of which emphasises this point.  Celestial Sound Effects by Seth Shostak notes correctly that, "they're electromagnetic noise, converted by electronic devices ... into signals that - when played through a loudspeaker - become the atmospheric pressure waves we call sound."

The second piece is What Is the Color of the Universe? by Mario Livio, which uses Karl Glazebrook and Ivan Baldry survey of more than 200,000 galaxies (the 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey) as a basis for examining the colour of the universe.

Thanks to Huffington Post and Janet Lee at TED for publishing the piece.

And here's the talk in full:

Source:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/honor-harger/tuning-into-the-universe_b_2737168.html

Listening to the Aurora

 

For centuries, folklore has reported that people have been able to hear, as well as see, the Northern Lights, or the aurora borealis. For the first time, researchers in Finland have been able to provide
evidence of what these historical listeners may have been detecting.

The "auroral sounds" are formed about 70 meters above the ground level, according to a team from Aalto University in Finland. They report that "researchers located the sound sources by installing three separate microphones in an observation site where the auroral sounds were recorded. They then compared sounds captured by the microphones and determined the location of the sound source. The aurora borealis was seen at the observation site. The simultaneous measurements of the geomagnetic disturbances, made by the Finnish Meteorological Institute, showed a typical pattern of the northern lights episodes."

Science Daily noted that: "Details about how the auroral sounds are created are still a mystery. The sounds do not occur regularly when the northern lights are seen. The recorded, unamplified sounds can be similar to crackles or muffled bangs which last for only a short period of time. Other people who have heard the auroral sounds have described them as distant noise and sputter. Because of these different descriptions, researchers suspect that there are several mechanisms behind the formation of these auroral sounds. These sounds are so soft that one has to listen very carefully to hear them and to distinguish them from the ambient noise."

Professor Unto Laine from Aalto University commented, "our research proved that, during the occurrence of the northern lights, people can hear natural auroral sounds related to what they see. In the past, researchers thought that the aurora borealis was too far away for people to hear the sounds it made. This is true. However, our research proves that the source of the sounds that are associated with the aurora borealis we see is likely caused by the same energetic particles from the sun that create the northern lights far away in the sky. These particles or the geomagnetic disturbance produced by them seem to create sound much closer to the ground."

Source: http://www.aalto.fi/en/current//news/view/2012-07-09/
Listen: http://www.youtube.com

Spider-goats and the Rise of Synthetic Biology

Spider-goats, synthetic neurobiology and bio-hacking - Adam Rutherford's recent synthetic biology documentary for the BBC's flagship science programme, Horizon, is an important compendium of cutting edge ideas. Equal parts fascinating and disturbing, the documentary, provocatively entitled Playing God, was an overview of how synthetic biologists are breaking down nature into spare parts, and rebuilding it however they please.

Rutherford began by introducing viewers to "spider-goats" - goats which have been cross-bred with spiders, so that they excrete spider-silk in their milk.

Spider-silk is among the strongest materials which occurs in nature, but it's practical use to science has been limited by the relatively tiny amounts that scientists can extract from spiders. Spiders are notoriously impossible to farm, due to their cannibalistic nature. So scientists at Utah State University have come up with an ingenious method of producing spider-silk in industrial quantities.

As Rutherford explains in an article for The Observer, Randy Lewis, a professor of genetics at Utah, took the gene that encodes silk from an orb-weaver spider, and placed it among the DNA that prompts milk production in the goats. This genetic circuit was then inserted in an egg and implanted into a mother goat. Now, when the goats lactate, their milk contains spider-silk protein. The practical use for large quantities of spider-silk are numerous, but Lewis is interested in it's medical potential. He notes, "we already know that we can produce spider silk that's good enough to be used in ligament repair. [....] We've done some studies that show that you can put it in the body and you don't get inflammation and get ill."

The documentary further probed the medical implications for this type of work by introducing Ron Weiss's work at MIT. Weiss's team are creating living programmable machines that seek and destroy only the cells that cause disease. Using BioBricks, they have built a "cancer assassin cell". It distinguishes a cancer cell from a healthy cell using a set of five criteria. It then destroys the tumour cell if it satisfied those conditions. As Rutherford notes, "this sniper targeting is the opposite of the blunderbuss approach of chemotherapy, which can destroy both tumour and healthy cells with reckless abandon."

The documentary also probed how relatively simple it has become to experiment with synthetic biology, due to the popularisation of BioBricks and the emergence of biohacking and biology-hobbyists such as BioCurious. After visiting the BioCurious hobby space in the States, Rutherford comments: "there, high-school students were learning about biology by introducing fluorescent proteins from deep-sea jellyfish into bacteria to make them glow in the dark. In 2009, three scientists won Nobel prizes for this work. Already, it is literally child's play."

The documentary analyses industrial applications of synthetic biology, such as the development of synthetic biodiesel. Biotech companies Amyris have modified brewer's yeast so that instead of fermenting sugar to produce alcohol, diesel seeps out of every cell. The biodiesel is already in use.

Rutherford takes a balanced approach to the field, giving watchdog and campaign group, ETC, an opportunity to point of the risks of producing synethetic organisms on an industrial scale.. Their stance on synthetic biology can be found here.

This fascinating documentary and the companion article in The Observer, which documents the main narrative, is an excellent primer to an incredibly fast-moving field.

Sources:
BBC Horizon
The Observer

Guardian Podcast

Listening to the earth move

Christchurch-based sound engineer Ben Edwards recorded a magnitude 6 earthquake which struck earthquake-plagued Christchurch in New Zealand on 23.12.11.

As Edwards tells it, "whilst recording some drums in an old brick warehouse for the up and coming Eastern album we experienced a large aftershock. (5.8 in magnitude). We sat outside for a while and convinced ourselves it was ok to re enter the old building and continue our project... I was rolling as we were undertaking some line and level checking... this time we got it. 6.0 magnitude in a room full of kegs and bottles."

It's an incredible and sobering listen, and helps you understand what it must be like living in Christchurch - a city that's experienced nearly 10,000 earthqukes since the big one in September 2010.

Source: http://soundcloud.com/charlie-underwood/chch-earthquake-23-12-11-raw

Particle physics wind chime

Continuing our theme of sonification, particle physicist Matt Bellis is one of a group of scientists who have created a novel way of transforming particle detectors into musical instruments. The Particle Physics Windchime is a computer application that takes particle physics data, such as particle type, momentum, distance from a fixed point, and other datasets, and turns it into sound. First conceived at the Science Hack Day in San Francisco in 2010 by Bellis and fellow scientist, David Harris, the Windchime is currently sonifying data from BABAR, a high energy physics experiment located at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California.

In creating their instrument, Bellis and his collaborators were inspired by the way that wind chimes work. Their chime is played by the particles passing through it, just like wind through a wind chime. "Think of it," Bellis said in a recent interview with SLAC, "the wind itself makes no sound. You hear the wind if it rustles the leaves in a tree. The motion of the wind itself doesn't necessarily make a sound. The wind has to interact with something to make noise." In the same way, "When you have these particles that pass through the detector, they send it ringing, resonating."

Bellis emphasises that sonifying data in this way can help lead to important new scientific insights: "I wanted to create the Particle Physics Windchime partly because I wanted to see if there's something new we can learn from the data. Is there something I can hear in the data that I can't see or that a computer can't pick up? Will it add to an intuitive understanding of the data?"

The Particle Physics Windchime is by no means the only project that sonifies particle physics data in order to understand it in new ways. The LHC Sound Project has been converting data from the ATLAS experiment at CERN for the last two years.

Run by Lily Asquith, Richard Dobson, Archer Endrich and Alabama 3 percussionist, Sir Eddie Real, the project is helping scientists see data from the LHC in different ways. The scientists and composers have notes in several interviews how musical the data appears to be:

"We can hear clear structures in the sound, almost as if they had been composed. They seem to tell a little story all to themselves. They're so dynamic and shifting all the time, it does sound like a lot of the music that you hear in contemporary composition," Richard Dobson (in an interview with the BBC, June 2010).

Sources: https://news.slac.stanford.edu/features/ear-science-particle-physics-windchime-0

&

http://www.stanford.edu

A history of the universe in sound

Our Particle Decelerator correspondent gives a TED talk on the story of the history of the universe by listening. It's punctuated by three anecdotes which show how accidental encounters with strange noises, taught us some of the most important things we know about space ...

Whilst the talk refers to "sounds from space", it is important to emphasise that stars and planets are not directly audible. Sound waves can not propagate in the vacuum of space. However, it is possible for radio waves emitted from celestial bodies to be heard by using radio technology.

The talk recalls the early history of the science of radio astronomy. Before astronomy was computerised, radio astronomers would monitor radio telescopes by listening. In our solar system, the Sun is the strongest source of radio waves, so it's the most powerful transmitter in our radio sky. Jupiter also sends us strong, and beautifully varied, radio signals. And radio astronomers also detect radio waves from far-flung celestial bodies in the distant universe, and simple audification techniques allow us to hear these signals.

Source: http://www.ted.com/talks/honor_harger_a_history_of_the_universe_in_sound.html

An exquisite new instrument for listening to the Music of the Spheres

This week, the remarkable Kepler spacecraft has been in the news for the fascinating new research it is generating in detecting the size and age of stars. Kepler is using a technique that scientists dub "asteroseismology" to measure minuscule variations in a star's brightness that occur as sound-waves bounce within it.

Dr Bill Chaplin, Reader in Solar and Stellar Physics, from the University of Birmingham's School of Physics and Astronomy, spoke at the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference on Saturday 19 February 2011, giving an overview of results on the study of solar-type stars using the science of asteroseismology.

Asteroseismology is the observation of the natural resonances, or pulsations, of stars. Using the data from these oscillations, collected by the NASA Kepler spacecraft, it is possible to measure the ages and sizes of stars, and to map out their interiors with hitherto unknown precision. The Kepler Mission is primarily used to look for extrasolar planets - planets that are outside our solar system orbiting other stars, but this new finding is one of the most significant pieces of research is has yielded in recent times.

Chaplin told the conference that asteroseismology was, in essence, listening to the "music of the stars" - a somewhat poetically apt reference, given that the Kepler craft is named after the 17th century German mathematician and astronomer, Johannes Kepler who reinvigorated Pythagorus notion of the"music of the spheres".

For some time, I have been researching how radio astronomy, when used as an instrument of audification, can enable us to move closer to the "music of the spheres" (http://radioqualia.va.com.au/honor/research.html). But astroseismology is proving to be an equally powerful instrument in helping us appreciate the sonic character of our universe.

Sources:
http://v.gd/kepler
http://is.gd/chaplin

Listen to the Deep Ocean - live!

Last year, we reported on research published in Nature that showed how marine biologists were working hand-in-hand with physicists to use bio-acoustics technology for the dual purpose of monitoring marine live, and searching for neutrinos.

The recently launched Listening to the Deep Ocean Environment (LIDO) website takes this collaborative approach one step further. Michel André, a bioacoustician at the Technical University of Catalonia in Barcelona, Spain, and his colleagues, have spent the past 10 years placing hydrophones on the seabed, on existing research platforms that monitor earthquakes, tsunamis and detect neutrino particles from space.

They are studying sub-sea noise so that researchers can better understand the effects of human activity on whales and dolphins. But what's really extraordinary about their work is that they're allowing us to tune in. The LIDO website has links to live audio feeds from eleven hydrophones located in European waters, and North American waters.

André, quoted in the New Scientist, notes: "the system is powered from the shore, and streams audio data to a server where the signals are analysed and published directly on the internet."

With more hydrophones in the network the new system could reveal the effects of noise pollution on whales. Hydrophones can pick up sounds from baleen whales hundreds of kilometres away, so installations in different places could be used to triangulate an animal's position and track its course. It should therefore be possible to determine if animals change course in response to bursts of noise, or alter their preferred routes because of new sources of noise like shipping routes or harbours.

"It's the first time we have been able to monitor acoustic events on a large temporal and spatial scale," André says

An algorithm developed by André's laboratory filters the different frequencies in the signal to identify specific sounds, including the songs of 26 species of whales and dolphins, and noise from human activities such as shipping, wind farms, oil and gas drilling, and seismic testing.

Roger Gentry, an adviser for the E&P Sound and Marine Life Joint Industry Programme, comments that, "[Michel] André deserves a lot of credit for thinking in broad terms and using modern technology to make the oceans and marine mammals more familiar and accessible to us all."

André is a previous Rolex award-winner, acknowledged for his work designing a system to protect whales from collisions with ships: http://rolexawards.com/en/the-laureates/michelandre-biography.jsp

Sources: 

http://listentothedeep.net
http://www.newscientist.com

The Micronium - The World's Smallest Musical Instrument

Musician Tony Conrad is quoted as saying, "modern physics had been generated as a branch of music" (http://bit.ly/fBUSe). New research carried out by the University of Twente seems to bear this out, with engineers and physicists creating the world's smallest musical instrument.

The micronium is the first musical instrument with dimensions measured in mere micrometres that produces audible tones. It has strings a fraction of the thickness of a human hair, with microscopic weights to pluck them: A composition has been specially written for the instrument by Arvid Jense, who is studying MediaMusic at the conservatorium in Enschede.

Science Daily notes that earlier musical instruments with these minimal dimensions only produced tones that are inaudible to humans. But thanks to ingenious construction techniques, students from the MESA+ Institute for Nanotechnology of the University of Twente in The Netherlands have succeeded in producing scales that are audible when amplified. To do so, they made use of the possibilities offered by micromechanics: the construction of moving structures with dimensions measured in micrometres. These miniscule devices can be built thanks to the ultra-clean conditions in a 'clean room', and the advanced etching techniques that are possible there.

The micronium played a leading role at the opening of a two-day scientific conference on micromechanics at Atak (http://www.atak.nl) in Enschede in September, where Arvid Jense's composition,'Impromptu No. 1 for Micronium', was premiered.

The tiny musical instrument is made up of springs that are only a tenth of the thickness of a human hair, and vary in length from a half to a whole millimetre. A mass of a few dozen micrograms is hung from these springs. The mass is set in motion by so-called 'comb drives': miniature combs that fit together precisely and shift in relation to each other, so 'plucking' the springs and creating sounds. The mass vibrates with a maximum deflection of just a few micrometres. This minimal movement can be accurately measured, and produces a tone. Each tone has its own mass spring system, and six tones fit on a microchip. By combining a number of chips, a wider range of tones can be achieved.

"The tuning process turned out to be the greatest challenge," says Johan Engelen, who devised and led the project.

Source: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/09/100928083836.htm

Listening to the Universe at FM Frequencies - LOFAR

The UK's South East LOFAR radio astronomy station has been opened by Jocelyn Bell Burnell.

LOFAR reports that the telescope will 'listen' to the Universe at FM frequencies, helping astronomers detect when the first stars in the Universe were formed, to reveal more about how the Universe evolved. During the ceremony, guests were able to observe a pulsar in real time using the Chilbolton station. Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell discovered the first radio pulsars, so it was most appropriate for her to perform the opening.

Professor Rob Fender of the University of Southampton, Principal Investigator of the LOFAR UK project said "The most amazing thing is that these small dipole antennas can pick up faint radio signals from over 10 billion years ago, when the universe was a fraction of its current size, and that this signal can be mapped over the entire sky by the telescope without a single moving part."

LOFAR has five major research areas:

1. Surveying space beyond our galaxy to try to understand the history of star formation and black hole growth over cosmological time
2. Probing the extreme astrophysical environments that lead to transient bright bursts in the radio sky, such as from pulsars, the highly magnetised remains of dead stars
3. Understanding cosmic rays, the storm of high-energy particles (mostly protons and helium nuclei) that rain down on Earth
4. Studying the local space environment, to see how the wind of particles billowing away from the Sun interacts with the Earth.
5. Investigating cosmic magnetism - the origin of the large-scale fields that pervade the Universe.

Source: http://is.gd/fqTtO

Disappearing dimensions: quantum gravity creates dots & lines

"I think it is one of the most interesting things to happen in quantum gravity for quite some time"
Renate Loll of Utrecht University, the Netherlands

A paper recently published on Arxiv suggests that, due to the effects of quantum gravity, on tiny scales, 3D space may give way to mere lines.

The New Scientist reports that researchers working on theories of quantum gravity, which aim to unite quantum mechanics with general relativity, have recently noticed that several different quantum gravity theories all predict the same strange behaviour at small scales: fields and particles start to behave as if space is one-dimensional.

"There are some strange coincidences here that might be pointing toward something important," says Steven Carlip at the University of California, Davis.

So on a quantum level, space is dot & lines created from vibrating strings ...

Rather reminds me of the show we put together for the BBC and the Sonic Arts Network a wee while back: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/cutandsplice/online_ex.shtml 

The neutrino and the whale

A physicist recording underwater sounds has made an unexpected discovery.

An underwater effort to detect subatomic particles has ended up detecting sperm whales instead.

Nature reports on a reports on a partnership between marine biologists and particle physicists in Catania, in Eastern Sicily.

Source: http://www.nature.com/news/2009/091202/full/462560a.html

Phonon laser: the weirding module of our age?

In a nice example of science-fiction becoming science fact, the "weirding module" described by Frank Herbert in Dune appears to be becoming reality.  The first-ever phonon laser - which uses amplified sound - has been created.

The laser uses phonons - the smallest quantized unit of vibrational energy - and was been created by German and U.S. scientists from the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics (Garching, Germany) and the California Institute of Technology (Pasadena, California, U.S.A.)

Source: http://www.nature.com/nphys/journal/v5/n9/full/nphys1367.html & http://tr.im/ynNA

The Guild of Scientific Troubadours

The Guild of Scientific Troubadours is an alliance of songwriters united to write and record catchy pop songs about scientific discoveries. Nearly every day, a new discovery is revealed. Every week, new science art.  Their website not only collects together precious flotsam and jetsam jettisoned from assorted science blogs and RSS feeds, but also acts as a repository for the musical tributes, which obviously, vary dramatically in quality.

Source: guildofscientifictroubadours.com

Sound Black Hole

Israeli physicists have created a unique phenomena - an acoustic black hole. Instead of trapping light in the form of photons (particles of light), the Technion laboratory in Haifa have created an artificial black hole which traps particles of sound - phonons.

The sound black hole was generated in attempt to detect Hawking radiation, the as yet hypothetical radiation proposed by Stephen Hawking more than 30 years ago, which causes black holes to evaporate over time.

Andrew Zimmerman Jones notes that "quantum physics indicates that pairs of "virtual phonons" are constantly being created and destroyed. If one of these pairs forms near the event horizon of the sound black hole, one of the phonons may end up getting pulled into the black hole while the other escapes." This may be the best proof yet that Hawking radiation exists.

Source: http://physicsworld.com
&
http://physics.about.com

Human ear inspires universal radio chip

The IEEE Journal of Solid State Circuits report that MIT engineers have built a fast, ultra-broadband, low-power radio chip, modeled on the human inner ear, that could enable wireless devices capable of receiving cell phone, Internet, radio and television signals. 

Devices such as cellphones or FM radios are generally tuned to only a narrow frequency band. The new device is inspired by the network of hairs in the inner ear, which can pick up a wide range of sound frequencies.

One can't help but be reminded of Douglas Kahn's observation in his 2006 paper, Radio was discovered before it was invented (bringing amber to Riga):

"Since we humanoids have pressure-sensitive eardrums rather than electro-sensitive antennae, we must resort to technology. Perhaps it would be different if we had our 16,000-20,000 cochlear hairs growing on the surface of our heads like sideburns, instead of them being immersed in the two ocean shells in our heads, we would have our body's electrical apparatus at a more immediate disposal and be able to hear the electromagnetic class of waves."

Source: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org

Source: http://www.newscientist.com

Tony Conrad's substratum of interests

Tony Conrad is the maestro of "extended duration as a conceptual armature", a musician, filmmaker and media-theorist of pioneering stature. He established the monochrome flicker as one of the central tropes in moving image, and created entirely distinctive forms of drone music both within, and outside of, The Dream Syndicate. In later works, such as Slapping Pythagoras his theoretical positions on Western cultural discourse became more evident.

This stimulating and rich discussion between Conrad and fellow musician, David Grubbs, explores Conrad's views on physics:

"modern physics [has] been generated as a branch of music",

audiences:

"Something that intrigues me a lot – and which I still haven’t decided about – is the suggestion that music should not have audiences. Just to get the audience out of the picture entirely seems like an interesting challenge, because every time I tell myself that the audience is why I’m doing everything [....] Every time I find myself thinking that, I realize that I’m barking up the wrong tree, and that if I try to head in the opposite direction, there’s something like a multifarious void out there."

and the future:

"For me, there’s another project, and that is to begin to try to create a structure of laws that can address the needs of 2010. From Futurism to Dogme, manifesto-like conditions can be productive [...] There’s a kind of cultural convergence that’s taking place that brings all these things together. I don’t think that’s unproductive. It reflects the conceptual initiative that was apparent last century with Happenings and all kind of things, basically going back to the Futurists. The Futurists actually predicted the future."

A must-read.

Source: http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/always_at_the_end/

Trimpin: sound of invention

Take a look at the trailer for this documentary about German sound alchemist, Trimpin.

He designs, builds, programs, and composes outrageous ensembles of musical instruments from the periphery of reality. One of his more ambitious experiments is designing a 'perpetual motion' machine in a glass foundry.

Source: http://www.vimeo.com/3559372

Telharmonium Memories

Before the radio, there was the Telharmonium, designed to broadcast music across the telephone wires. Here's a great link to one of our favourite archaic oddities, from our friends at Odd Instrument.

Source: http://oddstrument.com/2009/03/11/telharmonium/